Huge Asteroid to Fly Past Earth This Month

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A big asteroid will cruise by Earth at the end of the month,
making its closest approach to our planet for at least the next
two centuries.

The May 31 flyby of
asteroid 1998 QE2, which is about 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers)
long, poses no threat to Earth. The space rock will come within
3.6 million miles (5.8 million km) of our planet — about 15 times
the distance separating Earth and the moon, researchers say.

But the close approach will still be dramatic for astronomers,
who plan to get a good look at 1998 QE2 using two huge radar
telescopes — NASA's 230-foot (70 meters) Goldstone dish in
California and the 1,000-foot (305 m) Arecibo Observatory in
Puerto Rico. [ Photos:
Asteroids in Deep Space ]

"Whenever an
asteroid approaches this closely, it provides an important
scientific opportunity to study it in detail to understand its
size, shape, rotation, surface features and what they can tell us
about its origin," Lance Benner of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., principal investigator for
Goldstone radar observations, said in a statement.

"We will also use new radar measurements of the asteroid's
distance and velocity to improve our calculation of its orbit and
compute its motion farther into the future than we could
otherwise," Benner added.

Asteroid 1998 QE2 was discovered in August 1998 by astronomers
working with MIT's Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR)
program in New Mexico.

The space rock's name is not an homage to England's Queen
Elizabeth II, or to the famous 12-deck ocean liner that was
retired from service in 2008. It's just the moniker assigned by
the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., which names each
newfound asteroid according to an established alphanumeric scheme
that lays out when it was discovered.

Astronomers plan to study 1998 QE2 intensively from May 30
through June 9, using the Goldstone and Arecibo dishes to learn
as much as possible about the asteroid before it slips off once
more into the depths of space.

Even from about 4 million miles (6.4 million km) away, Goldstone
images may be able to resolve features on 1998 QE2 as small as 12
feet (3.75 m) across, researchers said.

"It is tremendously exciting to see detailed images of this
asteroid for the first time," Benner said. "With radar we can
transform an object from a point of light into a small world with
its own unique set of characteristics. In a real sense, radar
imaging of near-Earth asteroids is a fundamental form of
exploring a whole class of solar system objects."

NASA leads the global effort to identify
potentially dangerous asteroids. Our planet has been pummeled
by space rocks throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, and more
strikes are in our future.

The planet got a dramatic reminder of this reality this past Feb.
15. On that day, a 55-foot (17 m) object
exploded without warning over Russia, just hours before the
130-foot asteroid 2012 DA14 gave Earth a close shave, missing our
planet by just 17,200 miles (27,000 km).